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Drink

English Lemonade

A citrus drink made with lemon juice, sugar, and water, served over cracked ice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

English Lemonade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lemon and sugar

  1. Wash the lemons and rub the zest over the sugar lumps.

  2. Squeeze the juice from the lemons over the sugar.

Make the syrup and lemonade

  1. Boil 1 cup of water with 4 tablespoons of sugar to make a syrup.

  2. Add the lemon juice and sugar mixture to the syrup and stir until melted.

  3. Add 3 cups of boiling water and cover closely to cool.

Serve

  1. When ready to serve, pour over cracked ice.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Lemons
Provide the juice and zest that give the lemonade its sharp, aromatic flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the drink and balances the acidity of the lemon juice.
Sugar lumps
Absorb lemon oil from the zest, carrying its aroma into the sugar that dissolves later.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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